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Mobile HCM: It’s not the future, it is right now

- by Natalia Rachelson

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Steve Boese, Director Product Strategy, Oracle I’ll bet you reached for your iPhone or Android or BlackBerry and took a quick look at email or Facebook or last night’s text messages before you even got out of bed this morning. Come on, admit it, it’s ok, you are among friends here. See, feel better now? But seriously, the incredible growth and near-ubiquity of increasingly powerful, capable, and for many of us, essential in our daily lives mobile devices has profoundly changed the way we communicate, consume information, socialize, and more and more, conduct business and get our work done. And if you doubt that profound change has happened, just think for a moment about the last time you misplaced your iPhone. The shivers, the cold sweats, the panic... We have all been there. And indeed your personal experiences with mobile technology echoes throughout the world - here are a few data points to consider: Market research firm IDC estimates 1.8 billion mobile phones will be shipped in 2012. A recent Pew study reports 46% of Americans own a smartphone of some kind. And finally in the USA, ownership of tablets like the iPad has doubled from 10% to 19% in the last year. So truly for the Human Resources leader, the question is no longer, ‘Should HR explore ways to exploit mobile devices and their always-on nature to better support and empower the modern workforce?’, but rather ‘How can HR best take advantage of smartphone and tablet capability to provide information, enable transactions, and enhance decision making?’. Because even though moving HCM applications to mobile devices seems inherently logical given today’s fast-moving and mobile workforces, and its promise to deliver incredible value to the organization, HR leaders also have to consider many factors before devising their Mobile HCM strategy and embarking on mobile HR technology projects. Here are just some of the important considerations for HR leaders as you build your strategies and evaluate mobile HCM solutions: Does your organization provide mobile devices to the workforce today, and if so, will the current set of deployed devices have the necessary capability and ecosystems to support your mobile HCM initiatives? Will you allow workers to use or bring their own mobile devices, (commonly abbreviated as ‘BYOD’), and if so are your IT and Security organizations in agreement and capable of supporting that strategy? Do you know which workers need access to mobile HCM applications? Often mobile HCM capability flows down in an organization, with executives and other ‘road-warrior’ types having the most immediate needs, followed by field sales staff, project managers, and even potential job candidates. But just as an organization will have to spend time understanding ‘who’ should have access to mobile HCM technology, the ‘what’ of the way the solutions should be deployed to these groups will also vary. What works and makes sense for the executive, (company-wide dashboards and analytics on an iPad), might not be as relevant for a retail store manager, (employee schedules, location-level sales and inventory data, transaction approvals, etc.). With Oracle Fusion HCM, we are taking an approach to mobile HR that encompasses not just the mobile solution needs for the various types of worker, but also incorporates the fundamental attributes of great mobile applications - the ability to support end-to-end transactions, apps that respond with lightning-fast speed, with functions that are embedded in a worker’s daily activities, and features that can be mashed-up easily with other business areas like Finance and CRM. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the Oracle Fusion HCM team, delivering mobile experiences that truly enhance, enable, and empower the mobile workforce, and deliver on the design mantras of the best-in-class consumer applications, continues to shape and drive design decisions. Mobile is no longer the future, it is right now, and the cutting-edge HR leader of today will need to consider how mobile fits her HCM technology strategy from here on out. You can learn more about our ideas and plans for Oracle Fusion HCM mobile solutions at https://fusiontap.oracle.com/.

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Interview with Tomas Ulin at the MySQL Innovation Day

- by Monica Kumar

MySQL Innovation Day held on June 5, 2012 was a great event for the MySQL engineers, users and customers to gather, share and network. I was able to get a few minutes with Tomas Ulin, Vice President of MySQL Engineering at Oracle, to ask him some questions. Here are the highlights of my interview with Tomas. Monica: This was the first MySQL Innovation Day, correct? Why now, what was the strategy behind hosting this kind of event? Tomas: In the last year, we have rolled out an incredible number of MySQL events worldwide – some targeted at developers that are new to MySQL and others for the MySQL savvy. At the MySQL Innovation Day, our first event of this kind,, we had a number of our key engineers presenting lightning talks delivering previews of key new features as well as discussing roadmap. Our goal is to keep an open dialogue with the MySQL community. In fact, we are hosting a two-day conference, another first, for the MySQL community called MySQL Connect on Sept. 29-30 in San Francisco. If you attended the MySQL Innovation Day and liked what we did, you are going to love MySQL Connect. We’ll have a lot more of our engineers and many users and community members presenting hour long sessions and hands on labs. Our engineers will be presenting new MySQL features as well offer previews of upcoming enhancements. Monica: What's the big take-away from today's MySQL Innovation Day? Tomas: I hope the most important takeaway for attendees was to see that Oracle has been driving, and continues to drive MySQL innovation with a steady stream of new great GA and Development Milestone releases. Monica: What were attendees most interested in? What feedback did they have? Tomas: Feedback from attendees was incredibly positive and encouraging. In particular, they liked the interaction with the MySQL engineers and were also excited about the new early access features in MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster 7.3. In addition, sessions delivered by MySQL users like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter were very well received. For example, Pinterest talked about using MySQL to scale from 0 to billions of page views/month, Twitter talked about “Scaling twitter with MySQL” and Facebook discussed the many options to implement MySQL master failover solutions. The presentations are already available for download while some of the session videos will be made available on the MySQL Innovation Day web page shortly. Monica: How would you distinguish the use of MySQL vs. Oracle Database? What key factors should customers consider? Tomas: MySQL and Oracle Database complement each other. They are very different products, best suited to different use cases. Customers can choose world-class solutions from Oracle to fulfill a variety of needs. MySQL is a great choice for enterprise web-based, custom and embedded apps. Oracle Database is the leading choice for enterprise packaged applications such as ERP, CRM as well as high-end data warehousing and business intelligence applications. Monica: What are the highlights of the current MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Release and early access features for MySQL Cluster 7.3? Tomas: MySQL 5.6 development milestone release builds on MySQL 5.5 by improving: Optimizer for better Performance, Scalability Performance Schema for better instrumentation InnoDB for better transactional throughput Replication for higher availability, data integrity NoSQL options for more flexibility We announced some new early access features in MySQL 5.6, including binary log group commit. We also announced early access features in MySQL Cluster 7.3 including support for foreign key constraints. Monica: How do people get these releases? Tomas: You can access development milestone releases by going to: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysqlThen select the “Development Release” tab. The MySQL Cluster 7.3 and other early access features can be downloaded at: http://labs.mysql.com Monica: What's coming up next for MySQL? Tomas: Our development team is working in overdrive, cranking out new features with community feedback. Don’t miss the MySQL Connect conference being held in San Francisco on Sept. 29 and 30th. My team and I will be there. I hope you can join us! Monica: Thank you for your time, Tomas. I look forward to seeing you at the MySQL Connect conference. To our followers, I hope you found this interview informative. I welcome your comments. Please stay tuned here for more updates on MySQL. Note: Monica Kumar is Senior Director of product marketing for Linux, Virtualization and MySQL at Oracle.

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Connecting to DB2 from SSIS

- by Christopher House

The project I'm currently working on involves moving various pieces of data from a legacy DB2 environment to some SQL Server and flat file locations. Most of the data flows are real time, so they were a natural fit for the client's MQSeries on their iSeries servers and BizTalk to handle the messaging. Some of the data flows, however, are daily batch type transmissions. For the daily batch transmissions, it was decided that we'd use SSIS to pull the data direct from DB2 to either a SQL Server or flat file. I'm not at all an SSIS guy, I've done a bit here and there, but mainly for situations were we needed to move data from a dev environment to QA, mostly informal stuff like that. And, as much as I'm not an SSIS guy, I'm even less a DB2/iSeries guy. Prior to this engagement, my knowledge of DB2 was limited to the fact that it's an IBM product and that it was probably a DBMS flatform (that's what the DB in DB2 means, right?). One of my first goals when I came onto this project was to develop of POC SSIS package to pull some data from DB2 and dump it to a flat file. It sounded like a pretty straight forward task. As always, the devil is in the details. Configuring the DB2 connection manager took a bit of trial and error. As such, I thought I'd post my experiences here in hopes that they might save someone the efforts I went through. That being said, please keep in mind, as I pointed out, I'm not at all a DB2 guy, so my terminology and explanations may not be 100% spot on. Before you get started, you need to figure out how you're going to connect to DB2. From the research I did, it looks like there are a few options. IBM has both an OLE DB and .Net data provider which can be found here. I installed their client access tools and tried to use both the .Net and OLE DB providers but I received an error message from both when attempting to connect to the iSeries that indicated I needed a license for a product called DB2 Connect. I inquired with one of my client's iSeries resources about a license for this product and it appears they didn't have one, so that meant the IBM drivers were out. The other option that I found quite a bit of discussion around was Microsoft's OLE DB Provider for DB2. This driver is part of the feature pack for SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition and can be downloaded here. As it turns out, I already had Microsoft's driver installed on my dev VM, which stuck me as odd since I hadn't installed it. I discovered that the driver is installed with the BizTalk adapter pack for host systems, which was also installed on my VM. However, it looks like the version used by the adapter pack is newer than the version provided in the SQL Server feature pack. Once you get the driver installed, create a connection manager in your package just like you normally would and select the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for DB2 from the list of available drivers. After you select the driver, you'll need to enter in your host name, login credentials and initial catalog. A couple of things to note here. First, the Initial catalog needs to be the same as your host name. Not sure why that is, but trust me, it just does. Second, for credentials, in my environment, we're using what the client's iSeries people refer to as "profiles". I guess this is similar to SQL auth in the SQL Server world. In other words, they've given me a username and password for connecting to DB, so I've entered it here. Next, click the Data Links button. On the Data Links screen, enter your package collection on the first tab. Package collection is one of those DB2 concepts I'm still trying to figure out. From the little bit I've read, packages are used to control SQL compilation and each DB2 connection needs one. The package collection, I believe, controls where your package is created. One of the iSeries folks I've been working with told me that I should always use QGPL for my package collection, as QGPL is "general purpose" and doesn't require any additional authority. Next click the ellipsis next to the Network drop-down. Here you'll want to enter your host name again. Again, not sure why you need to do this, but trust me, my connection wouldn't work until I entered my hostname here. Finally, go to the Advanced tab, select your DBMS platform and check Process binary as character. My environment is DB2 on the iSeries and iSeries is the replacement for AS/400, so I selected DB2/AS400 for my platform. Process binary as character was necessary to handle some of the DB2 data types. I had a few columns that showed all their data as "System.Byte[]". Checking Process binary as character resolved this. At this point, you should be good to go. You can go back to the Connection tab on the Data Links dialog to perform a couple of tests to validate your configuration. The Test Connection button is obvious, this just verifies you can connect to the host using the configuration data you've entered. The Packages button will attempt to connect to the host and create the packages required to execute queries. This isn't meant to be a comprehensive look SSIS and DB2, these are just some of the notes I've come up with since I've started working with DB2 and SSIS. I'm sure as I continue developing my packages, I'll find more quirks and will post them here.

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Form, function and complexity in rule processing

- by Charles Young

Tim Bass posted on ‘Orwellian Event Processing’. I was involved in a heated exchange in the comments, and he has more recently published a post entitled ‘Disadvantages of Rule-Based Systems (Part 1)’. Whatever the rights and wrongs of our exchange, it clearly failed to generate any agreement or understanding of our different positions. I don't particularly want to promote further argument of that kind, but I do want to take the opportunity of offering a different perspective on rule-processing and an explanation of my comments. For me, the ‘red rag’ lay in Tim’s claim that “...rules alone are highly inefficient for most classes of (not simple) problems” and a later paragraph that appears to equate the simplicity of form (‘IF-THEN-ELSE’) with simplicity of function. It is not the first time Tim has expressed these views and not the first time I have responded to his assertions. Indeed, Tim has a long history of commenting on the subject of complex event processing (CEP) and, less often, rule processing in ‘robust’ terms, often asserting that very many other people’s opinions on this subject are mistaken. In turn, I am of the opinion that, certainly in terms of rule processing, which is an area in which I have a specific interest and knowledge, he is often mistaken. There is no simple answer to the fundamental question ‘what is a rule?’ We use the word in a very fluid fashion in English. Likewise, the term ‘rule processing’, as used widely in IT, is equally difficult to define simplistically. The best way to envisage the term is as a ‘centre of gravity’ within a wider domain. That domain contains many other ‘centres of gravity’, including CEP, statistical analytics, neural networks, natural language processing and so much more. Whole communities tend to gravitate towards and build themselves around some of these centres. The term 'rule processing' is associated with many different technology types, various software products, different architectural patterns, the functional capability of many applications and services, etc. There is considerable variation amongst these different technologies, techniques and products. Very broadly, a common theme is their ability to manage certain types of processing and problem solving through declarative, or semi-declarative, statements of propositional logic bound to action-based consequences. It is generally important to be able to decouple these statements from other parts of an overall system or architecture so that they can be managed and deployed independently. As a centre of gravity, ‘rule processing’ is no island. It exists in the context of a domain of discourse that is, itself, highly interconnected and continuous. Rule processing does not, for example, exist in splendid isolation to natural language processing. On the contrary, an on-going theme of rule processing is to find better ways to express rules in natural language and map these to executable forms. Rule processing does not exist in splendid isolation to CEP. On the contrary, an event processing agent can reasonably be considered as a rule engine (a theme in ‘Power of Events’ by David Luckham). Rule processing does not live in splendid isolation to statistical approaches such as Bayesian analytics. On the contrary, rule processing and statistical analytics are highly synergistic. Rule processing does not even live in splendid isolation to neural networks. For example, significant research has centred on finding ways to translate trained nets into explicit rule sets in order to support forms of validation and facilitate insight into the knowledge stored in those nets. What about simplicity of form? Many rule processing technologies do indeed use a very simple form (‘If...Then’, ‘When...Do’, etc.) However, it is a fundamental mistake to equate simplicity of form with simplicity of function. It is absolutely mistaken to suggest that simplicity of form is a barrier to the efficient handling of complexity. There are countless real-world examples which serve to disprove that notion. Indeed, simplicity of form is often the key to handling complexity. Does rule processing offer a ‘one size fits all’. No, of course not. No serious commentator suggests it does. Does the design and management of large knowledge bases, expressed as rules, become difficult? Yes, it can do, but that is true of any large knowledge base, regardless of the form in which knowledge is expressed. The measure of complexity is not a function of rule set size or rule form. It tends to be correlated more strongly with the size of the ‘problem space’ (‘search space’) which is something quite different. Analysis of the problem space and the algorithms we use to search through that space are, of course, the very things we use to derive objective measures of the complexity of a given problem. This is basic computer science and common practice. Sailing a Dreadnaught through the sea of information technology and lobbing shells at some of the islands we encounter along the way does no one any good. Building bridges and causeways between islands so that the inhabitants can collaborate in open discourse offers hope of real progress.

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8 Things You Can Do In Android’s Developer Options

- by Chris Hoffman

The Developer Options menu in Android is a hidden menu with a variety of advanced options. These options are intended for developers, but many of them will be interesting to geeks. You’ll have to perform a secret handshake to enable the Developer Options menu in the Settings screen, as it’s hidden from Android users by default. Follow the simple steps to quickly enable Developer Options. Enable USB Debugging “USB debugging” sounds like an option only an Android developer would need, but it’s probably the most widely used hidden option in Android. USB debugging allows applications on your computer to interface with your Android phone over the USB connection. This is required for a variety of advanced tricks, including rooting an Android phone, unlocking it, installing a custom ROM, or even using a desktop program that captures screenshots of your Android device’s screen. You can also use ADB commands to push and pull files between your device and your computer or create and restore complete local backups of your Android device without rooting. USB debugging can be a security concern, as it gives computers you plug your device into access to your phone. You could plug your device into a malicious USB charging port, which would try to compromise you. That’s why Android forces you to agree to a prompt every time you plug your device into a new computer with USB debugging enabled. Set a Desktop Backup Password If you use the above ADB trick to create local backups of your Android device over USB, you can protect them with a password with the Set a desktop backup password option here. This password encrypts your backups to secure them, so you won’t be able to access them if you forget the password. Disable or Speed Up Animations When you move between apps and screens in Android, you’re spending some of that time looking at animations and waiting for them to go away. You can disable these animations entirely by changing the Window animation scale, Transition animation scale, and Animator duration scale options here. If you like animations but just wish they were faster, you can speed them up. On a fast phone or tablet, this can make switching between apps nearly instant. If you thought your Android phone was speedy before, just try disabling animations and you’ll be surprised how much faster it can seem. Force-Enable FXAA For OpenGL Games If you have a high-end phone or tablet with great graphics performance and you play 3D games on it, there’s a way to make those games look even better. Just go to the Developer Options screen and enable the Force 4x MSAA option. This will force Android to use 4x multisample anti-aliasing in OpenGL ES 2.0 games and other apps. This requires more graphics power and will probably drain your battery a bit faster, but it will improve image quality in some games. This is a bit like force-enabling antialiasing using the NVIDIA Control Panel on a Windows gaming PC. See How Bad Task Killers Are We’ve written before about how task killers are worse than useless on Android. If you use a task killer, you’re just slowing down your system by throwing out cached data and forcing Android to load apps from system storage whenever you open them again. Don’t believe us? Enable the Don’t keep activities option on the Developer options screen and Android will force-close every app you use as soon as you exit it. Enable this app and use your phone normally for a few minutes — you’ll see just how harmful throwing out all that cached data is and how much it will slow down your phone. Don’t actually use this option unless you want to see how bad it is! It will make your phone perform much more slowly — there’s a reason Google has hidden these options away from average users who might accidentally change them. Fake Your GPS Location The Allow mock locations option allows you to set fake GPS locations, tricking Android into thinking you’re at a location where you actually aren’t. Use this option along with an app like Fake GPS location and you can trick your Android device and the apps running on it into thinking you’re at locations where you actually aren’t. How would this be useful? Well, you could fake a GPS check-in at a location without actually going there or confuse your friends in a location-tracking app by seemingly teleporting around the world. Stay Awake While Charging You can use Android’s Daydream Mode to display certain apps while charging your device. If you want to force Android to display a standard Android app that hasn’t been designed for Daydream Mode, you can enable the Stay awake option here. Android will keep your device’s screen on while charging and won’t turn it off. It’s like Daydream Mode, but can support any app and allows users to interact with them. Show Always-On-Top CPU Usage You can view CPU usage data by toggling the Show CPU usage option to On. This information will appear on top of whatever app you’re using. If you’re a Linux user, the three numbers on top probably look familiar — they represent the system load average. From left to right, the numbers represent your system load over the last one, five, and fifteen minutes. This isn’t the kind of thing you’d want enabled most of the time, but it can save you from having to install third-party floating CPU apps if you want to see CPU usage information for some reason. Most of the other options here will only be useful to developers debugging their Android apps. You shouldn’t start changing options you don’t understand. If you want to undo any of these changes, you can quickly erase all your custom options by sliding the switch at the top of the screen to Off.

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Analytic functions – they’re not aggregates

- by Rob Farley

SQL 2012 brings us a bunch of new analytic functions, together with enhancements to the OVER clause. People who have known me over the years will remember that I’m a big fan of the OVER clause and the types of things that it brings us when applied to aggregate functions, as well as the ranking functions that it enables. The OVER clause was introduced in SQL Server 2005, and remained frustratingly unchanged until SQL Server 2012. This post is going to look at a particular aspect of the analytic functions though (not the enhancements to the OVER clause). When I give presentations about the analytic functions around Australia as part of the tour of SQL Saturdays (starting in Brisbane this Thursday), and in Chicago next month, I’ll make sure it’s sufficiently well described. But for this post – I’m going to skip that and assume you get it. The analytic functions introduced in SQL 2012 seem to come in pairs – FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE, LAG and LEAD, CUME_DIST and PERCENT_RANK, PERCENTILE_CONT and PERCENTILE_DISC. Perhaps frustratingly, they take slightly different forms as well. The ones I want to look at now are FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE, and PERCENTILE_CONT and PERCENTILE_DISC. The reason I’m pulling this ones out is that they always produce the same result within their partitions (if you’re applying them to the whole partition). Consider the following query: SELECT YEAR(OrderDate), FIRST_VALUE(TotalDue) OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate) ORDER BY OrderDate, SalesOrderID RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING), LAST_VALUE(TotalDue) OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate) ORDER BY OrderDate, SalesOrderID RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING), PERCENTILE_CONT(0.95) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY TotalDue) OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)), PERCENTILE_DISC(0.95) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY TotalDue) OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)) FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader ; This is designed to get the TotalDue for the first order of the year, the last order of the year, and also the 95% percentile, using both the continuous and discrete methods (‘discrete’ means it picks the closest one from the values available – ‘continuous’ means it will happily use something between, similar to what you would do for a traditional median of four values). I’m sure you can imagine the results – a different value for each field, but within each year, all the rows the same. Notice that I’m not grouping by the year. Nor am I filtering. This query gives us a result for every row in the SalesOrderHeader table – 31465 in this case (using the original AdventureWorks that dates back to the SQL 2005 days). The RANGE BETWEEN bit in FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE is needed to make sure that we’re considering all the rows available. If we don’t specify that, it assumes we only mean “RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND CURRENT ROW”, which means that LAST_VALUE ends up being the row we’re looking at. At this point you might think about other environments such as Access or Reporting Services, and remember aggregate functions like FIRST. We really should be able to do something like: SELECT YEAR(OrderDate), FIRST_VALUE(TotalDue) OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate) ORDER BY OrderDate, SalesOrderID RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING) FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader GROUP BY YEAR(OrderDate) ; But you can’t. You get that age-old error: Msg 8120, Level 16, State 1, Line 5 Column 'Sales.SalesOrderHeader.OrderDate' is invalid in the select list because it is not contained in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause. Msg 8120, Level 16, State 1, Line 5 Column 'Sales.SalesOrderHeader.SalesOrderID' is invalid in the select list because it is not contained in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause. Hmm. You see, FIRST_VALUE isn’t an aggregate function. None of these analytic functions are. There are too many things involved for SQL to realise that the values produced might be identical within the group. Furthermore, you can’t even surround it in a MAX. Then you get a different error, telling you that you can’t use windowed functions in the context of an aggregate. And so we end up grouping by doing a DISTINCT. SELECT DISTINCT YEAR(OrderDate), FIRST_VALUE(TotalDue) OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate) ORDER BY OrderDate, SalesOrderID RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING), LAST_VALUE(TotalDue) OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate) ORDER BY OrderDate, SalesOrderID RANGE BETWEEN UNBOUNDED PRECEDING AND UNBOUNDED FOLLOWING), PERCENTILE_CONT(0.95) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY TotalDue) OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)), PERCENTILE_DISC(0.95) WITHIN GROUP (ORDER BY TotalDue) OVER (PARTITION BY YEAR(OrderDate)) FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader ; I’m sorry. It’s just the way it goes. Hopefully it’ll change the future, but for now, it’s what you’ll have to do. If we look in the execution plan, we see that it’s incredibly ugly, and actually works out the results of these analytic functions for all 31465 rows, finally performing the distinct operation to convert it into the four rows we get in the results. You might be able to achieve a better plan using things like TOP, or the kind of calculation that I used in http://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/archive/2011/08/23/t-sql-thoughts-about-the-95th-percentile.aspx (which is how PERCENTILE_CONT works), but it’s definitely convenient to use these functions, and in time, I’m sure we’ll see good improvements in the way that they are implemented. Oh, and this post should be good for fellow SQL Server MVP Nigel Sammy’s T-SQL Tuesday this month.

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How to Collect Debug Info for Oracle SQL Developer

- by thatjeffsmith

In a perfect world, there would be no software bugs. Developers would always test their code. QA would find any scenarios and bugs the developers hadn’t already thought of. Regression tests would be complete and flawless. But alas, we can only afford to pay mere humans here, so we will have bugs from time to time. Or sometimes you are trying to do something the software wasn’t designed for, or perhaps your machine has exhausted it’s resources trying to build the un-buildable. When you run into problems, you will need help. Developers need your help so they can help you. Surprisingly enough, feedback like this isn’t very helpful: Your program isn’t working. How can I make it work? When you are ready to work with us on the SQL Developer OTN forum, you will most likely be asked to run SQL Developer and capture the output from the command console. In case you need help with this, ere’s a step-by-step process you can follow in Windows 7 (should work in XP too.) Open a windows command window Start – Run – CMD Once it’s open, click on the window icon and select ‘Defaults.’ Change the default buffer size to be something bigger, much bigger. Set the CMD window default buffer size HIGHER Note: you only need to do this once. Navigate to your SQL Developer Installation Folder Instead of running the ‘sqldeveloper.exe’ file in the root directory, we are going to go several sub-directories down. Find the ‘bin’ sub-directory and run the ‘sqldeveloper.exe’ there. When you do this, a CMD window will open, and then you’ll see the SQL Developer application load. The SQL Developer bin directory - run the tool from here and get a logging window Use SQL Developer as normal, until it ‘breaks’ or ‘hangs’ Now, you are ready to grab the nitty-gritty information that MIGHT tell the developer what is going wrong or happening in your scenario. Click back into the CMD window Send a Ctrl+Break or a Ctrl+Pause. If you on a newer laptop that doesn’t have this key, be sure to check the ‘Fn’ subset of keys. If you need to map the BREAK or PAUSE buttons, this article might help. You can also try the on-screen keyboard in windows – just type ‘OSK’ in your START – RUN prompt. Copy the logging information from the command window – all of it We need this information, help us get it! Open a case with Oracle Support or Start a Thread on the Forums Or email me. If you’re on my blog reading this, it’s the least I can do to help Now, before you hit ‘Send’ or ‘Post’ or ‘Submit’ – be sure to add a brief description of what you were doing in the application when you ran into the problem. Even if you were doing ‘nothing,’ let us know how many connections you had open, what windows were active, etc. The more you can tell us, the higher your odds go up to getting a quick fix or at least an answer as to what is happening. Also include the following information: The version of SQL Developer you are running The version of the JDK you are using The OS you are using The version of Oracle you are connected to Now, don’t be surprised if you get asked to upgrade to a supported configuration, say ‘version 3.1 and the 1.6 JDK.’ Supporting older versions of software is fun, and while we enjoy a challenge, it may be easier for you to upgrade your way out of the problem at hand.

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Book Review Charlene Li's New Book: Open Leadership

- by david.talamelli

A few weeks ago, I was surprised when I looked in our mail box. I had received an Advance Copy of Charlene Li's new book titled "Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead". Charlene sent a tweet a while back asking anyone interested in receiving the book to submit their details. I sent off my details and didn't think I would hear anything back, so it was a pleasant surprise. With that I almost feel bad that it has taken me 3 weeks to read her book. It took this long mainly because it has been hard to fit in some quality reading time for myself with work, the kids, volunteering, etc..... I am happy to report I have finished her book and wanted to run through my initial thoughts with you. I first came across Charlene Li after reading her book "Groundswell" a few years ago, her latest book "Open Leadership" is a follow on from Groundswell and to me it seems like a natural progression from the question "Ok the business landscape is changing, what do we do now?" For me these two books have a different writing style to them. Groundswell from memory spoke about broad social media concepts and adoption and alerted us to some of the changes taking place in the SM landscape. Open Leadership seems to be focussed on taking those broad concepts and finding ways to implement them into your environment. That is breaking broad concepts down into individual action items that can be measured and analysed. As the business world changes Leaders must change their approach and let go of control to more control. One of the things I love reading about is seeing real life examples of how people and organisations are making these things happen. In this book Charlene has collected some great collateral and case studies from companies such as Cisco, Best Buy, The Red Cross and The State Bank of India (as a side-note, I wish now that I submitted my input for the Leaders I work with here at Oracle - there are some great examples here of people who empower their staff). As society becomes more adept at using social media it is inevitable that Leaders must become open with their employees, clients and partners. From the book some of the key points I took away are (I actually took away a lot more from this book, this is just an overview) : 1) Organisations should encourage risk taking. Without being a "hacker", how can we improve ourselves, our processes, our business, etc... The old saying you only fail by not trying applies here. If Leaders create a culture where people are afraid to stick their neck out - how will you innovate? 2) Leaders need to lead by example - if you want to promote an open and transparent business, a Leader needs to exemplify the traits they would like to see out of their employees. 3) The definition of a Leader is changing, open leadership is about being a catalyst to change that uses networks to spread a vision as opposed to traditional leadership that is viewed as a role. 4) There is a cultural and business shift taking place. Information is more wide-spread and is being disseminated faster than any other time in the past. Leaders who are open and transparent will thrive in this new business environment. 5) Leadership is not defined by a title - it is defined by a person's actions. Also anyone can be a Leader or has Leadership potential in them- it is a matter of drawing that out of people. I found this book useful and I also found myself looking at my own actions and the actions of others around me (including my management) to see how open and transparent I am in my work. For me I am glad I read this book as it validated my own thoughts of the changes we are seeing take place. This book has certainly given me some new ideas and helped me push my own boundaries of what I can do. The book has a number of action plans at the end of some of the chapters such as "Conducting you Openness Audit" that I think have helped me take thoughts and ideas and turn them into concrete action items. I have included a link to the introduction of the book here if anyone wants to have a read of it. If anyone else has read this book, it would be great to hear your thoughts/comments/review. Leave your comments below. This article was originally posted on David Talamelli's Blog - David's Journal on Tap

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Your thoughts on Best Practices for Scientific Computing?

- by John Smith

A recent paper by Wilson et al (2014) pointed out 24 Best Practices for scientific programming. It's worth to have a look. I would like to hear opinions about these points from experienced programmers in scientific data analysis. Do you think these advices are helpful and practical? Or are they good only in an ideal world? Wilson G, Aruliah DA, Brown CT, Chue Hong NP, Davis M, Guy RT, Haddock SHD, Huff KD, Mitchell IM, Plumbley MD, Waugh B, White EP, Wilson P (2014) Best Practices for Scientific Computing. PLoS Biol 12:e1001745. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001745 Box 1. Summary of Best Practices Write programs for people, not computers. (a) A program should not require its readers to hold more than a handful of facts in memory at once. (b) Make names consistent, distinctive, and meaningful. (c) Make code style and formatting consistent. Let the computer do the work. (a) Make the computer repeat tasks. (b) Save recent commands in a file for re-use. (c) Use a build tool to automate workflows. Make incremental changes. (a) Work in small steps with frequent feedback and course correction. (b) Use a version control system. (c) Put everything that has been created manually in version control. Don’t repeat yourself (or others). (a) Every piece of data must have a single authoritative representation in the system. (b) Modularize code rather than copying and pasting. (c) Re-use code instead of rewriting it. Plan for mistakes. (a) Add assertions to programs to check their operation. (b) Use an off-the-shelf unit testing library. (c) Turn bugs into test cases. (d) Use a symbolic debugger. Optimize software only after it works correctly. (a) Use a profiler to identify bottlenecks. (b) Write code in the highest-level language possible. Document design and purpose, not mechanics. (a) Document interfaces and reasons, not implementations. (b) Refactor code in preference to explaining how it works. (c) Embed the documentation for a piece of software in that software. Collaborate. (a) Use pre-merge code reviews. (b) Use pair programming when bringing someone new up to speed and when tackling particularly tricky problems. (c) Use an issue tracking tool. I'm relatively new to serious programming for scientific data analysis. When I tried to write code for pilot analyses of some of my data last year, I encountered tremendous amount of bugs both in my code and data. Bugs and errors had been around me all the time, but this time it was somewhat overwhelming. I managed to crunch the numbers at last, but I thought I couldn't put up with this mess any longer. Some actions must be taken. Without a sophisticated guide like the article above, I started to adopt "defensive style" of programming since then. A book titled "The Art of Readable Code" helped me a lot. I deployed meticulous input validations or assertions for every function, renamed a lot of variables and functions for better readability, and extracted many subroutines as reusable functions. Recently, I introduced Git and SourceTree for version control. At the moment, because my co-workers are much more reluctant about these issues, the collaboration practices (8a,b,c) have not been introduced. Actually, as the authors admitted, because all of these practices take some amount of time and effort to introduce, it may be generally hard to persuade your reluctant collaborators to comply them. I think I'm asking your opinions because I still suffer from many bugs despite all my effort on many of these practices. Bug fix may be, or should be, faster than before, but I couldn't really measure the improvement. Moreover, much of my time has been invested on defence, meaning that I haven't actually done much data analysis (offence) these days. Where is the point I should stop at in terms of productivity? I've already deployed: 1a,b,c, 2a, 3a,b,c, 4b,c, 5a,d, 6a,b, 7a,7b I'm about to have a go at: 5b,c Not yet: 2b,c, 4a, 7c, 8a,b,c (I could not really see the advantage of using GNU make (2c) for my purpose. Could anyone tell me how it helps my work with MATLAB?)

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Rob Blackwell on interoperability and Azure

- by Eric Nelson

At QCon in March we had a sample Azure application implemented in both Java and Ruby to demonstrate that the Windows Azure Platform is not just about .NET. The following is an interesting interview with Rob Blackwell, the R&D director of the partner who implemented the application. UK Interoperability Team Interviews Rob Blackwell, R&D Director at Active Web Solutions. Is Microsoft taking interoperability seriously? Yes. In the past, I think Microsoft has, quite rightly come in for criticism, but architects and developers should look at this again. The Interoperability Bridges site (http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/ ) shows a wide range of projects that allow interoperability from Java, Ruby and PHP for example. The Windows Azure platform has been architected with interoperable APIs in mind. It's straightforward to access the various storage facilities from just about any language or platform. Azure compute is capable of running more than just C# applications! Why is interoperability important to you? My company provides consultancy and bespoke development services. We're a Microsoft Gold Partner, but we live in the real world where companies have a mix of technologies provided by a variety of vendors. When developing an enterprise software solution, you rarely have a completely blank canvas. We often see integration scenarios where we need to exchange data with legacy systems. It's not unusual to see modern Silverlight applications being built on top of Java or Mainframe based back ends. Could you give us some examples of where interoperability has been important for your projects? We developed an innovative Sea Safety system for the RNLI Lifeboats here in the UK. Commercial Fishing is one of the most dangerous professions and we helped developed the MOB Guardian System which uses satellite technology and man overboard devices to raise the alarm when a fisherman gets into trouble. The solution is implemented in .NET running on Windows, but without interoperable standards, it would have been impossible to communicate with the satellite gateway technology. For more information, please see the case study: http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?CaseStudyID=4000005892 More recently, we were asked to build a web site to accompany the QCon 2010 conference in London to help demonstrate and promote interoperability. We built the site using Java and Restlet and hosted it in Windows Azure Compute. The site accepts feedback from visitors and all the data is stored in Windows Azure Storage. We also ported the application to Ruby on Rails for demonstration purposes. Visitors to the stand were surprised that this was even possible. Why should Java developers be interested in Windows Azure? Windows Azure Storage consists of Blobs, Queues and Tables. The storage is scalable, durable, secure and cost-effective. Using the WindowsAzure4j library, it's easy to use, and takes just a few lines of code. If you are writing an application with large data storage requirements, or you want an offsite backup, it makes a lot of sense. Running Java applications in Azure Compute is straightforward with tools like the Tomcat Solution Accelerator (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/winazuretomcat )and AzureRunMe (http://azurerunme.codeplex.com/ ). The Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus can also be used to connect heterogeneous systems running on different networks and in different data centres. How can The Service Bus be considered an interoperability solution? I think that the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus is one of Microsoft’s best kept secrets. Think of it as “a globally scalable application plumbing kit in the sky”. If you have used Enterprise Service Buses before, you’ll be familiar with the concept. Applications can connect to the service bus to securely exchange data – these can be point to point or multicast links. With the AppFabric Service Bus, the applications can exist anywhere that has access to the Internet and the connections can traverse firewalls. This makes it easy to extend or scale your application or reach out to other networks and technologies. For example, let’s say you have a SQL Server database running on premises and you want to expose the data to a Java application running in the cloud. You could set up a point to point Service Bus connection and use JDBC. Traditionally this would have been difficult or impossible without punching holes in firewalls and compromising security. Rob Blackwell is R&D Director at Active Web Solutions, www.aws.net , a Microsoft Gold Partner specialising in leading edge software solutions. He is an occasional writer and conference speaker and blogs at www.robblackwell.org.uk Related Links: UK Azure Online Community – join today. UK Windows Azure Site Start working with Windows Azure

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Social Network Updates: While You Were Busy Marketing 2

- by Mike Stiles

Since social moves at the speed of data, it’s already time for another update, as we did back in April, on the changes the various social networks have made or gone through while you were busy marketing. Facebook There’s a lot of talk Facebook’s developing a mobile product to act like Flipboard and surface news, from both users and media outlets. The biggest news was Facebook/Instagram’s introduction of 15-second videos, enhanced with with filters, to take some of Vine’s candy. You can also delete parts of videos and rerecord them, and there’s image stabilization. Facebook’s ad revenue is coming along just fine, thank you very much. 35% quarter-to-quarter growth in Q2. And it looks like new formats like Mobile App Install Ads and Unpublished Page Posts are adding to the mix. If you don’t already, you’ll soon see a little camera in comment boxes letting you insert photos right into the comments you make. The drive toward “more visual” continues. The other big news is Facebook’s adoption of our Twitter friend, the hashtag. Adding # sets apart the post topic so it can be easily found or discovered. It’s also being added to Google Plus, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Twitter Want to send someone a promoted tweet when they’re in range of your store? That could be happening by the end of this year. Some users have been seeing automatic in-stream previews of images on Twitter.com. Right now it’s images in your own tweets, but we can assume all tweets are next. Get your followers organized! Twitter raised the limit on the number of lists you can create from 20 to 1,000. They also raised the number of accounts you can have in a list from 500 to 5,000. Twitter started notifying you when someone favorites a tweet you’re mentioned in or re-tweets a tweet you re-tweeted. Anyway, it’s the first time Twitter’s notified you about indirect interactions like that. Who’s afraid of Instagram? A study shows 6-second Vine videos are being posted to Twitter at the rate of 9/second, up from 5/second 2 months ago. Vine has over 13 million users and branded Vines are 4x more likely to be shared than video ads. Google Plus Now featuring a 3-column redesigned stream, and images that take up a whole column. And photo filters Auto Highlight and Auto Awesome work to turn your photos into a real show. Google Hangouts is the workhorse for all Google messaging now, it’s not just an online chat with 9 people anymore. Google Plus Dashboard improves the connection between your company’s Google Plus business page and your Google Plus Local. Updates go out across all Google properties and you can do your managing from the dashboard. With Google Plus’ authorship system, you can build “Author Rank” based on what you write and put on the web. If your stuff is +1’ed and shared a lot, you’re the real deal and there are search result benefits. LinkedIn "Who's Viewed Your Updates" shows you what you’ve shared recently, who saw it and what they did about it in real-time. “Influencers” is, well, influential. Traffic to all LI news products has gone up 8x since it was introduced. LinkedIn is quickly figuring out how to get users to stick around awhile. You and your brand can post images and documents in status updates now. In fact, that whole “document posting” thing is making some analysts wonder if LinkedIn will drift on over to the Dropboxes and YouSendIts of the world. C’mon, admit it. Your favorite part of LinkedIn is being able to see who’s viewed your profile. Now you’ve got even more info and can see what/who you have in common. Premium users get even deeper insights about how people are finding them. If you’re a big fan of security, you’ll love that LinkedIn started offering two-factor authentication (2FA). It’s optional, but step 2 is a one-time code texted to your registered mobile. Pinterest A study showed pins have a looong shelf life compared to other social net posts. “Clicks kept coming for 30 days and beyond.” Most pins are timeless, and the infinite scroll causes people to see older pins. Is it a keeper? Pinterest jumped 82% to 54 million users in the past year. It’s valued at $2.5 billion and is one of the biggest sources of referral traffic there is. That said, CEO Ben Silbermann adds, "Right now, we don't make money." A new search feature stops you from having to endlessly scroll through your own pins looking for that waterfall picture you posted. Simply select “just my pins” in the search bar. New "Rich Pins" lets brands add info like price and availability to pins that can be updated daily via a data feed from your merchant site. Not so fast, you have to apply to Pinterest for it first. Like other social nets, Pinterest does not allow sexual content, nudity, or even partial nudity. However…some art contains nudity, and Pinterest wants to allow art. What constitutes “art” will be judged by…what we have to assume are Pinterest employees who love their job. @mikestilesPhoto: stock.xchng, Tim Marmon

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Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Posts

- by jkauffman

From a consumption point of view, tech blogging is a great resource for one-off articles on niche subjects. If you spend any time reading tech blogs, you may find yourself running into several common, useless types of posts tech bloggers slip into. Some of these lame posts may just be natural due to common nerd psychology, and some others are probably due to lame, lemming-like laziness. I’m sure I’ll do my fair share of fitting the mold, but I quickly get bored when I happen upon posts that hit these patterns without any real purpose or personal touches. 1. The Content Regurgitation Posts This is a common pattern fueled by the starving pan-handlers in the web traffic economy. These are posts that are terse opinions or addendums to an existing post. I commonly see these involve huge block quotes from the linked article which almost always produces over 50% of the post itself. I’ve accidentally gone to these posts when I’m knowingly only interested in the source material. Web links can degrade as well, so if the source link is broken, then, well, I’m pretty steamed. I see this occur with simple opinions on technologies, Stack Overflow solutions, or various tech news like posts from Microsoft. It’s not uncommon to go to the linked article and see the author announce that he “added a blog post” as a response or summary of the topic. This is just rude, but those who do it are probably aware of this. It’s a matter of winning that sweet, juicy web traffic. I doubt this leeching is fooling anybody these days. I would like to rally human dignity and urge people to avoid these types of posts, and just leave a comment on the source material. 2. The “Sorry I Haven’t Posted In A While” Posts This one is far too common. You’ll most likely see this quote somewhere in the body of the offending post: I have been really busy. If the poster is especially guilt-ridden, you’ll see a few volleys of excuses. Here are some common reasons I’ve seen, which I’ll list from least to most painfully awkward. Out of town Vague allusions to personal health problems (these typically includes phrases like “sick”, “treatment'”, and “all better now!”) “Personal issues” (which I usually read as "divorce”) Graphic or specific personal health problems (maximum awkwardness potential is achieved if you see links to charity fund websites) I can’t help but to try over-analyzing why this occurs. Personally, I see this an an amalgamation of three plain factors: Life happens Us nerds are duty-driven, and driven to guilt at personal inefficiencies Tech blogs can become personal journals I don’t think we can do much about the first two, but on the third I think we could certainly contain our urges. I’m a pretty boring guy and, whether or I like it or not, I have an unspoken duty to protect the world from hearing about my unremarkable existence. Nobody cares what kind of sandwich I’m eating. Similarly, if I disappear for a while, it’s unlikely that anybody who happens upon my blog would care why. Rest assured, if I stop posting for a while due to a vasectomy, you will be the first to know. 3. The “At A Conference”, or “Conference Review” Posts I don’t know if I’m like everyone else on this one, but I have never been successfully interested in these posts. It even sounds like a good idea: if I can’t make it to a particular conference (like the KCDC this year), wouldn’t I be interested in a concentrated summary of events? Apparently, no! Within this realm, I’ve never read a post by a blogger that held my interest. What really baffles is is that, for whatever reason, I am genuinely engaged and interested when talking to someone in person regarding the same topic. I have noticed the same phenomenon when hearing about others’ vacations. If someone sends me an email about their vacation, I gloss over it and forget about it quickly. In contrast, if I’m speaking to that individual in person about their vacation, I’m actually interested. I’m unsure why the written medium eradicates the intrigue. I was raised by a roaming pack of friendly wild video games, so that may be a factor. 4. The “Top X Number of Y’s That Z” Posts I’ve seen this one crop up a lot more in the past few of years. Here are some fabricated examples: 5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Code Top 7 Good Habits Programmers Learn From Experience The 8 Things to Consider When Giving Estimates Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Posts These are attention-grabbing headlines, and I’d assume they rack up hits. In fact, I enjoy a good number of these. But, I’ve been drawn to articles like this just to find an endless list of identically formatted posts on the blog’s archive sidebar. Often times these posts have overlapping topics, too. These types of posts give the impression that the author has given thought to prioritize and organize the points as a result of a comprehensive consideration of a particular topic. Did the author really weigh all the possibilities when identifying the “Top 4 Lame Tech Blogging Patterns”? Unfortunately, probably not. What a tool. To reiterate, I still enjoy the format, but I feel it is abused. Nowadays, I’m pretty skeptical when approaching posts in this format. If these trends continue, my brain will filter these blog posts out just as effectively as it ignores the encroaching “do xxx with this one trick” advertisements. Conclusion To active blog readers, I hope my guide has served you precious time in being able to identify lame blog posts at a glance. Save time and energy by skipping over the chaff of the internet! And if you author a blog, perhaps my insight will help you to avoid the occasional urge to produce these needless filler posts.

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Building the Elusive Windows Phone Panorama Control

When the Windows Phone 7 Developer SDK was released a couple of weeks ago at MIX10 many people noticed the SDK doesnt include a template for a Panorama control. Here at Clarity we decided to build our own Panorama control for use in some of our prototypes and I figured I would share what we came up with. There have been a couple of implementations of the Panorama control making their way through the interwebs, but I didnt think any of them really nailed the experience that is shown in the simulation videos. One of the key design principals in the UX Guide for Windows Phone 7 is the use of motion. The WP7 OS is fairly stripped of extraneous design elements and makes heavy use of typography and motion to give users the necessary visual cues. Subtle animations and wide layouts help give the user a sense of fluidity and consistency across the phone experience. When building the panorama control I was fairly meticulous in recreating the motion as shown in the videos. The effect that is shown in the application hubs of the phone is known as a Parallax Scrolling effect. This this pseudo-3D technique has been around in the computer graphics world for quite some time. In essence, the background images move slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth in 2D. Here is an example of the traditional use: http://www.mauriciostudio.com/. One of the animation gems I've learned while building interactive software is the follow animation. The premise is straightforward: instead of translating content 1:1 with the interaction point, let the content catch up to the mouse or finger. The difference is subtle, but the impact on the smoothness of the interaction is huge. That said, it became the foundation of how I achieved the effect shown below. Source Code Available HERE Before I briefly describe the approach I took in creating this control..and Ill add some **asterisks ** to the code below as my coding skills arent up to snuff with the rest of my colleagues. This code is meant to be an interpretation of the WP7 panorama control and is not intended to be used in a production application. 1. Layout the XAML The UI consists of three main components : The background image, the Title, and the Content. You can imagine each these UI Elements existing on their own plane with a corresponding Translate Transform to create the Parallax effect. 2. Storyboards + Procedural Animations = Sexy As I mentioned above, creating a fluid experience was at the top of my priorities while building this control. To recreate the smooth scroll effect shown in the video we need to add some place holder storyboards that we can manipulate in code to simulate the inertia and snapping. Using the easing functions built into Silverlight helps create a very pleasant interaction. 3. Handle the Manipulation Events With Silverlight 3 we have some new touch event handlers. The new Manipulation events makes handling the interactivity pretty straight forward. There are two event handlers that need to be hooked up to enable the dragging and motion effects: the ManipulationDelta event : (the most relevant code is highlighted in pink) Here we are doing some simple math with the Manipulation Deltas and setting the TO values of the animations appropriately. Modifying the storyboards dynamically in code helps to create a natural feel.something that cant easily be done with storyboards alone. And secondly, the ManipulationCompleted event: Here we take the Final Velocities from the Manipulation Completed Event and apply them to the Storyboards to create the snapping and scrolling effects. Most of this code is determining what the next position of the viewport will be. The interesting part (shown in pink) is determining the duration of the animation based on the calculated velocity of the flick gesture. By using velocity as a variable in determining the duration of the animation we can produce a slow animation for a soft flick and a fast animation for a strong flick. Challenges to the Reader There are a couple of things I didnt have time to implement into this control. And I would love to see other WPF/Silverlight approaches. 1. A good mechanism for deciphering when the user is manipulating the content within the panorama control and the panorama itself. In other words, being able to accurately determine what is a flick and what is click. 2. Dynamically Sizing the panorama control based on the width of its content. Right now each control panel is 400px, ideally the Panel items would be measured and then panorama control would update its size accordingly. 3. Background and content wrapping. The WP7 UX guidelines specify that the content and background should wrap at the end of the list. In my code I restrict the drag at the ends of the list (like the iPhone). It would be interesting to see how this would effect the scroll experience. Well, Its been fun building this control and if you use it Id love to know what you think. You can download the Source HERE or from the Expression Gallery Erik Klimczak | [email protected] | twitter.com/eklimczDid you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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SQLAuthority News – Community Tech Days – A SQL Legends in Ahmedabad – December 11, 2010

- by pinaldave

Ahmedabad is going to be fortunate city again on December 11. We are going to have SQL Server Legends present at the prestigious event of Community Tech Days in Ahmedabad. The venue details are as following: H K Hall, H K College Campus, Near Handloom House, Opp. Natraj Cinema, Ashram Road, Ahmedabad – 380009 Click here to Registration for the event. Agenda of the event is as following. 10:15am – 10:30am Welcome – Pinal Dave 10:30am – 11:15am SQL Tips and Tricks for .NET Developers by Jacob Sebastian 11:15am – 11:30am Tea Break 11:30am – 12:15pm Best Database Practice for SharePoint Server by Pinal Dave 12:15pm – 01:00pm Self Service Business Intelligence by Rushabh Mehta 01:00pm – 02:00pm Lunch 02:00pm – 02:45pm Managing your future, Managing your time by Vinod Kumar 02:45pm – 03:30pm Windows Azure News and Introducing Storage Services by Mahesh Devjibhai Dhola 03:30pm – 03:45pm Tea Break 03:45pm – 04:30pm Improve Silverlight application with Threads and MEF by Prabhjot Singh Bakshi 04:30pm – 04:45pm Thank you – Mahesh Devjibhai Dhola Ahmedabad considers itself extremely fortunate when there are SQL Legends presenting on various subjects in front of community. Here is brief introduction about them in my own words. (Their names are in order of the agenda). 1) Jacob Sebastian (SQL Server MVP) – This person needs no introduction. Every developer and programmer in Ahmedabad and India knows him. He is the one man who is founder of various community-related ideas like SQL Challenges, SQL Quiz and BeyondRelational. He works with me on all the community-related activities; we are extremely good friends. 2) Rushabh Mehta (SQL Server MVP) – If you use SQL Server – you know this man. He is the President of SQL Server of Professional Association (PASS) and one of the leading Business Intelligence (BI) Experts renowned in the world. He has blessed Ahmedabad once before and now doing once again this year. 3) Vinod Kumar (Microsoft Evangelist – SQL Server & BI) – Ahmedabad remembers him very well. During his last visit to Ahmedabad, a fight had almost broke outside the hall amidst the rush to listen him. There were more people standing and listening to him than those who were seated. This is one man Ahmedabad will never forget. 4) and Myself. I will not rate myself in the league of abovementioned experts, but I must say that I am fortunate to have friends like those above. We also have two strong .NET presenters – Mahesh and Prabhjot. During this event, there will be plenty of giveaways, lots of fun, demos and pure technical talk, specifically no marketing and promotion – just pure technical talk. The most interesting part is that all the SQL Legends – Jacob, Rushabh and Vinod are for sure presenting on SQL Server but with a twist. Jacob – He is going to talk about .NET and SQL – Optimization Techniques Rushabh – He is going to talk about SQL and BI – Self Service BI Vinod – He is going to talk about professional development of developers – Managing Time Pinal – Best Practices for SharePoint Database Administrators – SharePoint DBA – I have presented this session earlier. I promise this event is going to be one of the best events held ever. You can read about the earlier event over here. ?Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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Nerdstock 2012: A photo review of Microsoft TechEd North America 2012

- by The Un-T Guy

Not only could I not fathom that I would ever be attending a tech event of the magnitude of TechEd, neither could any of my co-workers. As the least technical person in the history of Information Technology ever, I felt as though I were walking into the belly of the beast, fearing I’d not be allowed out until I could write SSIS packages, program in Visual Basic, or at least arm wrestle a DBA. Most of my fears were unrealized. But I made it. I was here. I even got to wear the Mark of the Geek neck package with schedule, eyeglass cleaners, name badge (company name obfuscated so they don’t fire me), and a pen. The name badge was seemingly the key element, as every vendor in the place wanted to scan it to capture name, email address, and numbers to show their bosses back home. It also let me eat the food and drink the coffee so that’s a fair trade. A recurring theme throughout the presentations and vendor demos was “the Cloud” and BYOD (bring your own device). The below was a common site throughout the week, as attendees from all over the world brought their own devices and were able to (seemingly) seamlessly connect to the Worldwide Innerwebs. Apparently proof that Microsoft and the event organizers were practicing what they were preaching. “Cavernous” is one way to describe the downstairs facility itself. “Freaking cavernous” might be more accurate. Work sessions were held in classrooms on the second and third floors but the real action was happening downstairs. Microsoft bookstore, blogger hub (shoutout to Geekswithblogs.net), The Wall (sans Pink Floyd, sadly), couches, recharging stations… …a game zone with pool and air hockey tables, pinball machines, foosball… …vintage video games… …and a even giant chess board. Looked like this guy was opening with the Kaspersky parry. The blend of technology and fantasy even went so far as to bring childhood favorites to life. Assuming, of course, your childhood was pre-video games (like mine) and you were stuck with electric football and Rock ‘em Sock ‘em robots: And, lest the “combatants” become unruly or – God forbid – afternoon snacks were late, Orange County’s finest was on the scene to keep the peace. On a high-tech mode of transport, of course. She wasn’t the only one to think this was a swell way to transition from one concourse to the next. Given the level of support provided by the entire Orange County Convention Center staff, I knew they had to have some secret. Here’s one entrance to the vendor zone/”Technical Learning Center.” Couldn’t help but think of them as the remora attached to the Whale Shark that is Microsoft… …or perhaps planets orbiting the sun. Microsoft is just that huge and it seemed like every vendor in the industry looks forward to partnering with the tech behemoth. Aside from the free stuff from the vendors, probably the most popular place in the house was the dining area. Amazing spreads every day, multiple times a day. While no attendance numbers were available at press time, literally thousands of attendees were fed, and fed well, every day. And lest you think my post from earlier in the week exaggerated about the backpacks… …or that I’m exaggerating about the lunch crowds. This represents only about between 25-30% of the lunch crowd – it was all my camera could capture at once. No one went away hungry. The only thing missing was a a vat of Red Bull but apparently organizers went old school, with probably 100 urns of the original energy drink – coffee – all around the venue. Of course, following lunch and afternoon sessions, some preferred the even older school method of re-energizing. There were rumors that Microsoft was serving graham crackers and milk in this area. But they were only rumors. Cannot overstate the wonderful service provided by the Orange County Convention Center staff. Coffee, soft drinks, juice, and water were available always. Buffet meals were delicious with a wide range of healthy options available, in addition to hundreds (at least) special meal requests supported every day. Ever tried to keep up with an estimated 9,000 hungry and thirsty IT-ers? These folks did. Kudos to all of the staff and many thanks! And while I occasionally poke fun at the Whale Shark, if nothing else this experience convinced me of one thing: Microsoft knows how to put on a professional event. Hundreds of informative, professionally delivered sessions, covering a wide range of topics set at varying levels of expertise (some that even I was able to follow), social activities, vendor partnerships…they brought everything you could ask for to inform, educate, and inspire an entire IT industry. So as I depart the belly of the beast, I can both take pride in the fact that I survived the week and marvel at the brilliance surrounding me. The IT industry – or at least the segment associated with Microsoft – is in good, professional hands. And what won’t fit in their hands can be toted in the Microsoft provided backpacks. Win-win. Until New Orleans…

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Leaks on Wikis: "Corporations...You're Next!" Oracle Desktop Virtualization Can Help.

- by adam.hawley

Between all the press coverage on the unauthorized release of 251,287 diplomatic documents and on previous extensive releases of classified documents on the events in Iraq and Afghanistan, one could be forgiven for thinking massive leaks are really an issue for governments, but it is not: It is an issue for corporations as well. In fact, corporations are apparently set to be the next big target for things like Wikileaks. Just the threat of such a release against one corporation recently caused the price of their stock to drop 3% after the leak organization claimed to have 5GB of information from inside the company, with the implication that it might be damaging or embarrassing information. At the moment of this blog anyway, we don't know yet if that is true or how they got the information but how did the diplomatic cable leak happen? For the diplomatic cables, according to press reports, a private in the military, with some appropriate level of security clearance (that is, he apparently had the correct level of security clearance to be accessing the information...he reportedly didn't "hack" his way through anything to get to the documents which might have raised some red flags...), is accused of accessing the material and copying it onto a writeable CD labeled "Lady Gaga" and walking out the door with it. Upload and... Done. In the same article, the accused is quoted as saying "Information should be free. It belongs in the public domain." Now think about all the confidential information in your company or non-profit... from credit card information, to phone records, to customer or donor lists, to corporate strategy documents, product cost information, etc, etc.... And then think about that last quote above from what was a very junior level person in the organization...still feeling comfortable with your ability to control all your information? So what can you do to guard against these types of breaches where there is no outsider (or even insider) intrusion to detect per se, but rather someone with malicious intent is physically walking out the door with data that they are otherwise allowed to access in their daily work? A major first step it to make it physically, logistically much harder to walk away with the information. If the user with malicious intent has no way to copy to removable or moble media (USB sticks, thumb drives, CDs, DVDs, memory cards, or even laptop disk drives) then, as a practical matter it is much more difficult to physically move the information outside the firewall. But how can you control access tightly and reliably and still keep your hundreds or even thousands of users productive in their daily job? Oracle Desktop Virtualization products can help.Oracle's comprehensive suite of desktop virtualization and access products allow your applications and, most importantly, the related data, to stay in the (highly secured) data center while still allowing secure access from just about anywhere your users need to be to be productive. Users can securely access all the data they need to do their job, whether from work, from home, or on the road and in the field, but fully configurable policies set up centrally by privileged administrators allow you to control whether, for instance, they are allowed to print documents or use USB devices or other removable media. Centrally set policies can also control not only whether they can download to removable devices, but also whether they can upload information (see StuxNet for why that is important...)In fact, by using Sun Ray Client desktop hardware, which does not contain any disk drives, or removable media drives, even theft of the desktop device itself would not make you vulnerable to data loss, unlike a laptop that can be stolen with hundreds of gigabytes of information on its disk drive. And for extreme security situations, Sun Ray Clients even come standard with the ability to use fibre optic ethernet networking to each client to prevent the possibility of unauthorized monitoring of network traffic.But even without Sun Ray Client hardware, users can leverage Oracle's Secure Global Desktop software or the Oracle Virtual Desktop Client to securely access server-resident applications, desktop sessions, or full desktop virtual machines without persisting any application data on the desktop or laptop being used to access the information. And, again, even in this context, the Oracle products allow you to control what gets uploaded, downloaded, or printed for example.Another benefit of Oracle's Desktop Virtualization and access products is the ability to rapidly and easily shut off user access centrally through administrative polices if, for example, an employee changes roles or leaves the company and should no longer have access to the information.Oracle's Desktop Virtualization suite of products can help reduce operating expense and increase user productivity, and those are good reasons alone to consider their use. But the dynamics of today's world dictate that security is one of the top reasons for implementing a virtual desktop architecture in enterprises.For more information on these products, view the webpages on www.oracle.com and the Oracle Technology Network website.

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SharePoint Saturday Michigan 2010 Recap, Slides, and Photos

- by Brian Jackett

This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint. This made my third SharePoint Saturday attended and second I’ve spoken at. I believe today it was announced that about 210 people total attended the event. I was very happy with the turnout, especially the ratio of male to female attendees. Typically with computer related conferences the ratio leans towards more males attending, but both Peter Serzo (one of conference organizers) and I both commented to each other that at the end of the day it appeared to be close to 40% women in the crowd. So here’s my recap of the weekend. Arrival Friday afternoon I drove up from Columbus, OH to Ann Arbor, MI and arrived around 4pm. I was attempting to avoid the rush hour traffic and construction backups. Turned out to be a good idea because other speakers coming up Friday got stuck on a highway which literally closed down in both directions due to a bad accident. I was talking my friend Sean McDonough through the highway closing and this was the first time I had seen a solid black traffic line on Google Maps. Most of us are familiar with Green, Yellow, and Red, but this line was black if that tells you how bad it got. Speaker “Dinner” Fast forward a few hours and it was time for the speaker “dinner.” I put “dinner” in quotes because with this night alone SPSMI set a new bar for nicest and most extravagant speaker appreciation events for SharePoint Saturday. By tapping into some very influential contacts, the conference organizers were able to provide a truck limo (yep you heard right) with refreshments, access to an underground suite at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and courtside tickets to see the Detroit Pistons play that night. Being a Michigan native I have to say that I was absolutely floored by this experience and very thankful to our conference organizers Peter, Sebastian, and Jesse along with Trillium Teamologies. Sessions The actual conference started Saturday morning at 9am with the keynote by Rob Collie who is the Microsoft program manager for PowerPivot. The day continued and I attended the following sessions: Mike Watson (@mikewat) – “SharePoint 2010 Fight Night: Devs vs. Admins” Karl Swedeberg (@kswedberg) – “A Walk on the Client Side with jQuery“ [my session] Brian Jackett (@briantjackett) - “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” Jeff Willinger (@jwillie) - “Social Computing and Collaboration Inside and Outside the 4 Walls” Paul Schaeflein (@paulschaeflein) – “PowerShell for the SharePoint Developer” My Presentation I had a great time presenting my session on Deploying SharePoint 2007 Solutions, but it wasn’t without its fair share of technical issues. As my session was right after lunch I came in to my room 10 mins early to set up my laptop, slides, and demos. As a quick background note, a few months ago I got an upgraded laptop from my company Sogeti and have been dual booting it between XP (factory installed) and Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V. As such I had prepared all of my demo virtual machines to run under Hyper-V. About 3 minutes before my session was scheduled to start though it became apparent that I did not have the correct display drivers to connect Windows Server 2008 R2 to the projector… As you can imagine this was a slight cause for concern as I was potentially going to be unable to give my presentation. Luckily for me I usually prepare for such unforeseen issues and had my presentation and some spare VMs that would run on XP on my external hard drive. Knowing this I rebooted my machine into XP and began my presentation without slides until about 5 mins into the session when everything was up and running on XP. Despite this being the first time I gave this presentation I have to say it was one of my favorites I’ve given so far. The audience was very engaged in the session and I received some great, positive feedback afterwards. Thanks to all who attended my session, I appreciate it very much. Link to Presentation Files For those of you who attended my session and would like my slides or demo PowerShell scripts they can be found on my SkyDrive at the link below. Also, if you have a few minutes and wouldn’t mind rating my session I have this session posted on SpeakerRate. As speakers we always appreciate any and all feedback attendees offer, so thank you if you are able to provide any. SkyDrive folder with session files Rate my SharePoint 2007 Solutions session Picture Albums For everyone else, here are my pictures from the weekend. The first link is to my FaceBook album which will have tagging (recommend this one.) The second is to my Live album if you care for higher resolution images. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154482&id=21905041&l=a3fb72ee8c View Full Album Conclusion A big thank you goes out to all of the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees of SPSMI. As I’ve said so many times, without each and every one of you these events wouldn’t be possible. I thoroughly enjoyed this trip back to my home state and presenting a new session. For those interested in my upcoming schedule I will be giving two sessions on PowerShell at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte in April, helping plan Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition in May, and I’m submitting sessions to Day of .Net Ann Arbor in May as well. Beyond that I haven’t planned out any travels. Thanks for reading my recap. Look forward to more technical posts now that I have a short break in conferences. -Frog Out links: Michigan image

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Seven Worlds will collide…. High Availability BI is not such a Distant Sun.

- by Testas

Over the last 5 years I have observed Microsoft persevere with the notion of Self Service BI over a series of conferences as far back as SQLBits V in Newport. The release of SQL Server 2012, improvements in Excel and the integration with SharePoint 2010 is making this a reality. Business users are now empowered to create their own BI reports through a number of different technologies such as PowerPivot, PowerView and Report Builder. This opens up a whole new way of working; improving staff productivity, promoting efficient decision making and delivering timely business reports. There is, however; a serious question to answer. What happens should any of these applications become unavailable? More to the point, how would the business react should key business users be unable to fulfil reporting requests for key management meetings when they require it? While the introduction of self-service BI will provide instant access to the creation of management information reports, it will also cause instant support calls should the access to the data become unavailable. These are questions that are often overlooked when a business evaluates the need for self-service BI. But as I have written in other blog posts, the thirst for information is unquenchable once the business users have access to the data. When they are unable to access the information, you will be the first to know about it and will be expected to have a resolution to the downtime as soon as possible. The world of self-service BI is pushing reporting and analytical databases to the tier 1 application level for some of Coeo’s customers. A level that is traditionally associated with mission critical OLTP environments. There is recognition that by making BI readily available to the business user, provisions also need to be made to ensure that the solution is highly available so that there is minimal disruption to the business. This is where High Availability BI infrastructures provide a solution. As there is a convergence of technologies to support a self-service BI culture, there is also a convergence of technologies that need to be understood in order to provide the high availability architecture required to support the self-service BI infrastructure. While you may not be the individual that implements these components, understanding the concepts behind these components will empower you to have meaningful discussions with the right people should you put this infrastructure in place. There are 7 worlds that you will have to understand to successfully implement a highly available BI infrastructure 1. Server/Virtualised server hardware/software 2. DNS 3. Network Load Balancing 4. Active Directory 5. Kerberos 6. SharePoint 7. SQL Server I have found myself over the last 6 months reaching out to knowledge that I learnt years ago when I studied for the Windows 2000 and 2003 (MCSE) Microsoft Certified System Engineer. (To the point that I am resuming my studies for the Windows Server 2008 equivalent to be up to date with newer technologies) This knowledge has proved very useful in the numerous engagements I have undertaken since being at Coeo, particularly when dealing with High Availability Infrastructures. As a result of running my session at SQLBits X and SQL Saturday in Dublin, the feedback I have received has been that many individuals desire to understand more of the concepts behind the first 6 “worlds” in the list above. Over the coming weeks, a series of blog posts will be put on this site to help understand the key concepts of each area as it pertains to a High Availability BI Infrastructure. Each post will not provide exhaustive coverage of the topic. For example DNS can be a book in its own right when you consider that there are so many different configuration options with Forward Lookup, Reverse Lookups, AD Integrated Zones and DNA forwarders to name some examples. What I want to do is share the pertinent points as it pertains to the BI infrastructure that you build so that you are equipped with the knowledge to have the right discussion when planning this infrastructure. Next, we will focus on the server infrastructure that will be required to support the High Availability BI Infrastructure, from both a physical box and virtualised perspective. Thanks Chris

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SQL SERVER – SSMS: Backup and Restore Events Report

- by Pinal Dave

A DBA wears multiple hats and in fact does more than what an eye can see. One of the core task of a DBA is to take backups. This looks so trivial that most developers shrug this off as the only activity a DBA might be doing. I have huge respect for DBA’s all around the world because even if they seem cool with all the scripting, automation, maintenance works round the clock to keep the business working almost 365 days 24×7, their worth is knowing that one day when the systems / HDD crashes and you have an important delivery to make. So these backup tasks / maintenance jobs that have been done come handy and are no more trivial as they might seem to be as considered by many. So the important question like: “When was the last backup taken?”, “How much time did the last backup take?”, “What type of backup was taken last?” etc are tricky questions and this report lands answers to the same in a jiffy. So the SSMS report, we are talking can be used to find backups and restore operation done for the selected database. Whenever we perform any backup or restore operation, the information is stored in the msdb database. This report can utilize that information and provide information about the size, time taken and also the file location for those operations. Here is how this report can be launched. Once we launch this report, we can see 4 major sections shown as listed below. Average Time Taken For Backup Operations Successful Backup Operations Backup Operation Errors Successful Restore Operations Let us look at each section next. Average Time Taken For Backup Operations Information shown in “Average Time Taken For Backup Operations” section is taken from a backupset table in the msdb database. Here is the query and the expanded version of that particular section USE msdb; SELECT (ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY t1.TYPE))%2 AS l1 , 1 AS l2 , 1 AS l3 , t1.TYPE AS [type] , (AVG(DATEDIFF(ss,backup_start_date, backup_finish_date)))/60.0 AS AverageBackupDuration FROM backupset t1 INNER JOIN sys.databases t3 ON ( t1.database_name = t3.name) WHERE t3.name = N'AdventureWorks2014' GROUP BY t1.TYPE ORDER BY t1.TYPE On my small database the time taken for differential backup was less than a minute, hence the value of zero is displayed. This is an important piece of backup operation which might help you in planning maintenance windows. Successful Backup Operations Here is the expanded version of this section. This information is derived from various backup tracking tables from msdb database. Here is the simplified version of the query which can be used separately as well. SELECT * FROM sys.databases t1 INNER JOIN backupset t3 ON (t3.database_name = t1.name) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupmediaset t5 ON ( t3.media_set_id = t5.media_set_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupmediafamily t6 ON ( t6.media_set_id = t5.media_set_id) WHERE (t1.name = N'AdventureWorks2014') ORDER BY backup_start_date DESC,t3.backup_set_id,t6.physical_device_name; The report does some calculations to show the data in a more readable format. For example, the backup size is shown in KB, MB or GB. I have expanded first row by clicking on (+) on “Device type” column. That has shown me the path of the physical backup file. Personally looking at this section, the Backup Size, Device Type and Backup Name are critical and are worth a note. As mentioned in the previous section, this section also has the Duration embedded inside it. Backup Operation Errors This section of the report gets data from default trace. You might wonder how. One of the event which is tracked by default trace is “ErrorLog”. This means that whatever message is written to errorlog gets written to default trace file as well. Interestingly, whenever there is a backup failure, an error message is written to ERRORLOG and hence default trace. This section takes advantage of that and shows the information. We can read below message under this section, which confirms above logic. No backup operations errors occurred for (AdventureWorks2014) database in the recent past or default trace is not enabled. Successful Restore Operations This section may not be very useful in production server (do you perform a restore of database?) but might be useful in the development and log shipping secondary environment, where we might be interested to see restore operations for a particular database. Here is the expanded version of the section. To fill this section of the report, I have restored the same backups which were taken to populate earlier sections. Here is the simplified version of the query used to populate this output. USE msdb; SELECT * FROM restorehistory t1 LEFT OUTER JOIN restorefile t2 ON ( t1.restore_history_id = t2.restore_history_id) LEFT OUTER JOIN backupset t3 ON ( t1.backup_set_id = t3.backup_set_id) WHERE t1.destination_database_name = N'AdventureWorks2014' ORDER BY restore_date DESC, t1.restore_history_id,t2.destination_phys_name Have you ever looked at the backup strategy of your key databases? Are they in sync and do we have scope for improvements? Then this is the report to analyze after a week or month of maintenance plans running in your database. Do chime in with what are the strategies you are using in your environments. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: SQL Reports

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Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC Review

- by Ben Griswold

A few years back I started dallying with test-driven development, but I never fully committed to the practice. This wasn’t because I didn’t believe in the value of TDD; it was more a matter of not completely understanding how to incorporate “test first” into my everyday development. Back in my web forms days, I could point fingers at the framework for my ignorance and laziness. After all, web forms weren’t exactly designed for testability so who could blame me for not embracing TDD in those conditions, right? But when I switched to ASP.NET MVC and quickly found myself fresh out of excuses and it became instantly clear that it was time to get my head around red-green-refactor once and for all or I would regretfully miss out on one of the biggest selling points the new framework had to offer. I have previously written about how I learned ASP.NET MVC. It was primarily hands on learning but I did read a couple of ASP.NET MVC books along the way. The books I read dedicated a chapter or two to TDD and they certainly addressed the benefits of TDD and how MVC was designed with testability in mind, but TDD was merely an afterthought compared to, well, teaching one how to code the model, view and controller. This approach made some sense, and I learned a bunch about MVC from those books, but when it came to TDD the books were just a teaser and an opportunity missed. But then I got lucky – Jonathan McCracken contacted me and asked if I’d review his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, and it was just what I needed to get over the TDD hump. As the title suggests, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC takes a different approach to learning MVC as it focuses on testing right from the very start. McCracken wastes no time and swiftly familiarizes us with the framework by building out a trivial Quote-O-Matic application and then dedicates the better part of his book to testing first – first by explaining TDD and then coding a full-featured Getting Organized application inspired by David Allen’s popular book, Getting Things Done. If you are a learn-by-example kind of coder (like me), you will instantly appreciate and enjoy McCracken’s style – its fast-moving, pragmatic and focused on only the most relevant information required to get you going with ASP.NET MVC and TDD. The book continues with the test-first theme but McCracken moves away from the sample application and incorporates other practical skills like persisting models with NHibernate, leveraging Inversion of Control with the IControllerFactory and building a RESTful web service. What I most appreciated about this section was McCracken’s use of and praise for open source libraries like Rhino Mocks, SQLite and StructureMap (to name just a few) and productivity tools like ReSharper, Web Platform Installer and ASP.NET SQL Server Setup Wizard. McCracken’s emphasis on real world, pragmatic development was clearly demonstrated in every tool choice, straight-forward code block and developer tip. Whether one is already familiar with the tools/tips or not, McCracken’s thought process is easily understood and appreciated. The final section of the book walks the reader through security and deployment – everything from error handling and logging with ELMAH, to ASP.NET Health Monitoring, to using MSBuild with automated builds, to the deployment of ASP.NET MVC to various web environments. These chapters, like those prior, offer enough information and explanation to simply help you get the job done. Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will turn you into an expert MVC developer overnight? Well, no. I don’t think any book can make that claim. If that were possible, I think book list prices would skyrocket! That said, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC provides a solid foundation and a unique (and dare I say necessary) approach to learning ASP.NET MVC. Along the way McCracken shares loads of very practical software development tips and references numerous tools and libraries. The bottom line is it’s a great ASP.NET MVC primer – if you’re new to ASP.NET MVC it’s just what you need to get started. Do I believe Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC will give you everything you need to start employing TDD in your everyday development? Well, I used to think that learning TDD required a lot of practice and, if you’re lucky enough, the guidance of a mentor or coach. I used to think that one couldn’t learn TDD from a book alone. Well, I’m still no pro, but I’m testing first now and Jonathan McCracken and his book, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC, played a big part in making this happen. If you are an MVC developer and a TDD newb, Test-Drive ASP.NET MVC is just the book for you.

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Browsing Your ADF Application Module Pooling Params with WLST

- by Duncan Mills

In ADF 11g you can of course use Enterprise Manager (EM) to browse and configure the settings used by ADF Business Components Application Modules, as shown here for one of my sample deployed applications. This screen you can access from the EM homepage by pulling down the Application Deployment menu, and then ADF > Configure ADF Business Components. Then select the profile that you are actually using (Hint: look in the DataBindings.cpx file to work this out - probably the "Local" version unless you've explicitly changed it. )So, from this screen you can change the pooling parameters and the world is good. But what if you don't have EM installed? In that case you can use the WebLogic scripting capabilities to view (and Update) the MBean Properties. Explanation The pooling parameters and many others are handled through Message Driven Beans that are created for the deployed application in the server. In the case of the ADF BC pooling parameters, this MBean will combine the configuration deployed as part of the application, along with any overrides defined as -D environement commands on the JVM startup for the application server instance. Using WLST to Browse the Bean ValuesFor our purposes here I'm doing this interactively, although you can also write a script or write Java to achieve the same thing.Step 0: Before You Start You will need the followingAccess to the console on the machine that is running the serverThe WebLogic Admin username and password (I'll use weblogic/password as my example here - yours will be different)The name of the deployed application (in this example FMWdh_application1)The package path to the bc4j.xcfg file (in this example oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfg) This is based on the default path for your model project so it shoudl be fairly easy to work out.The BC configuration your AM is actually running with (look in the DataBindings.cpx for that. In this example DealHelpServiceDeployed is the profile being used..)Step 1: Start the WLST consoleTo start at the beginning, you need to run the WLST command but that needs a little setup:Change to the wlserver_10.3/server/bin directory e.g. under your Fusion Middleware Home[oracle@mymachine] cd /home/oracle/FMW_R1/wlserver_10.3/server/binSet your environment using the setWLSEnv script. e.g. on Oracle Enterprise Linux:[oracle@mymachine bin] source setWLSEnv.shStart the WLST interactive console[oracle@mymachine bin] java weblogic.WLSTInitializing WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) ...Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting ShellType help() for help on available commandswls:/offline> Step 2:Enter the WLST commandsConnect to the server wls:> connect('weblogic','password')Change to the Custom root, this is where the AMPooling MBeans are registered wls:> custom()Change to the b4j MBean directorywls:> cd ('oracle.bc4j.mbean.config')Work out the correct directory for the AM configuration you need. This is the difficult bit, not because it's hard to do, but because the names are long. The structure here is such that every child MBean is displayed at the same level as the parent, so for each deployed application there will be many directories shown. In fact, do an ls() command here and you'll see what I mean. Each application will have one MBean for the app as a whole, and then for each deployed configuration in the .xcfg file you'll see: One for the config entry itself, and then one each for Security, DB Connection and AM Pooling. So if you deploy an app with just one configuration you'll see 5 directories, if it has two configurations in the .xcfg you'll see 9 and so on.The directory you are looking for will contain those bits of information you gathered in Step 0, specifically the Application Name, the configuration you are using and the xcfg name: First of all narrow your list to just those directories returned from the ls() command that begin oracle.bc4j.mbean.config:name=AMPool. These identify the AM pooling MBeans for all the deployed applications. Now look for the correct application name e.g. Application=FMWdh_application1The config setting in that sub-list should already be correct and match what you expect e.g. oracle.bc4j.mbean.config=oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfgFinally look for the correct value for the AppModuleConfigType e.g. oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType=DealHelpServiceDeployedNow you have identified the correct directory name, change to that (keep the name on one line of course - I've had to split it across lines here for clarity:wls:> cd ('oracle.bc4j.mbean.config:name=AMPool, type=oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType.AMPoolType, oracle.bc4j.mbean.config=oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfg, Application=FMWdh_application1, oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType=DealHelpServiceDeployed') Now you can actually view the parameter values with a simple ls() commandwls:> ls()And here's the output in which you can view the realtime values of the various pool settings: -rw- AmpoolConnectionstrategyclass oracle.jbo.common.ampool.DefaultConnectionStrategy -rw- AmpoolDoampooling true -rw- AmpoolDynamicjdbccredentials false -rw- AmpoolInitpoolsize 2 -rw- AmpoolIsuseexclusive true -rw- AmpoolMaxavailablesize 40 -rw- AmpoolMaxinactiveage 600000 -rw- AmpoolMaxpoolsize 4096 -rw- AmpoolMinavailablesize 2 -rw- AmpoolMonitorsleepinterval 600000 -rw- AmpoolResetnontransactionalstate true -rw- AmpoolSessioncookiefactoryclass oracle.jbo.common.ampool.DefaultSessionCookieFactory -rw- AmpoolTimetolive 3600000 -rw- AmpoolWritecookietoclient false -r-- ConfigMBean true -rw- ConnectionPoolManager oracle.jbo.server.ConnectionPoolManagerImpl -rw- Doconnectionpooling false -rw- Dofailover false -rw- Initpoolsize 0 -rw- Maxpoolcookieage -1 -rw- Maxpoolsize 4096 -rw- Poolmaxavailablesize 25 -rw- Poolmaxinactiveage 600000 -rw- Poolminavailablesize 5 -rw- Poolmonitorsleepinterval 600000 -rw- Poolrequesttimeout 30000 -rw- Pooltimetolive -1 -r-- ReadOnly false -rw- Recyclethreshold 10 -r-- RestartNeeded false -r-- SystemMBean false -r-- eventProvider true -r-- eventTypes java.lang.String[jmx.attribute.change] -r-- objectName oracle.bc4j.mbean.config:name=AMPool,type=oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType.AMPoolType,oracle.bc4j.mbean.config=oracle.demo.fmwdh.model.service.common.bc4j.xcfg,Application=FMWdh_application1,oracle.bc4j.mbean.config.AppModuleConfigType=DealHelpServiceDeployed -rw- poolClassName oracle.jbo.common.ampool.ApplicationPoolImpl Thanks to Brian Fry on the JDeveloper PM Team who did most of the work to put this sequence of steps together with me badgering him over his shoulder.

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Building a Distributed Commerce Infrastructure in the Cloud using Azure and Commerce Server

- by Lewis Benge

One of the biggest questions I routinely get asked is how scalable Commerce Server is. Of course the text book answer is the product has been around for 10 years, powers some of the largest e-Commerce websites in the world, so it scales horizontally extremely well. One argument however though is what if you can't predict the growth of demand required of your Commerce Platform, or need the ability to scale up during busy seasons such as Christmas for a retail environment but are hesitant on maintaining the infrastructure on a year-round basis? The obvious answer is to utilise the many elasticated cloud infrastructure providers that are establishing themselves in the ever-growing market, the problem however is Commerce Server is still product which has a legacy tightly coupled dependency on Windows and IIS components. Commerce Server 2009 codename "R2" however introduced to the concept of an n-tier deployment of Microsoft Commerce Server, meaning you are no longer tied to core objects API but instead have serializable Commerce Entity objects, and business logic allowing for Commerce Server to now be built into a WCF-based SOA architecture. Presentation layers no-longer now need to remain on the same physical machine as the application server, meaning you can now build the user experience into multiple-technologies and host them in multiple places – leveraging the transport benefits that a WCF service may bring, such as message queuing, security, and multiple end-points. All of this logic will still need to remain in your internal infrastructure, for two reasons. Firstly cloud based computing infrastructure does not support PCI security requirements, and secondly even though many of the legacy Commerce Server dependencies have been abstracted away within this version of the application, it is still not a fully supported to be deployed exclusively into the cloud. If you do wish to benefit from the scalability of the cloud however, you can still achieve a great Commerce Server and Azure setup by utilising both the Azure App Fabric in terms of the service bus, and authentication services and Windows Azure to host any online presence you may require. The architecture would be something similar to this: This setup would allow you to construct your Commerce Services as part of your on-site infrastructure. These services would contain all of the channels custom business logic, and provide the overall interface back into the underlying Commerce Server components. It would be recommended that services are constructed around the specific business domain of the application, which based on your business model would usually consist of separate services around Catalogue, Orders, Search, Profiles, and Marketing. The App Fabric service bus is then used to abstract and aggregate further the services, making them available to the cloud and subsequently secured by App Fabrics authentication services. These services are now available for consumption by any client, using any supported technology – not just .NET. Thus meaning you are now able to construct apps for IPhone, integrate with Java based POS Devices, and any many other potential uses. This aggregation is useful, and forms the basis of the further strategy around diversifying and enhancing the e-Commerce experience, but also provides the foundation for the scalability we want to gain from utilising a cloud-based application platform. The Windows Azure application platform is Microsoft solution to benefiting from the true economies of scale in terms of the elasticity of the cloud. Just before the launch of the Azure Platform – Domino's pizza actually managed to run their whole SuperBowl operation from the scalability of Windows Azure, and simply switching back to their traditional operation the next day with no residual infrastructure costs. The platform also natively can subscribe to services and messages exposed within the AppFabric service bus, making it an ideal solution to build and deploy a presentation layer which will need to support of scalable infrastructure – such as a high demand public facing e-Commerce portal, or a promotion element of a brand. Windows Azure has excellent support for ASP.NET, including its own caching providers meaning expensive operations such as catalogue queries can persist in memory on the application server, reducing the demand on internal infrastructure and prioritising it for more business critical operations such as receiving orders and processing payments. Windows Azure also supports other languages too, meaning utilising this approach you can technically build a Commerce Server presentation layer in Java, PHP, or Ruby – or equally in ASP.NET or Silverlight without having to change any of the underlying business or Commerce Server implementation. This SOA-style architecture is one of the primary differentiators for Commerce Server as a product in the e-Commerce market, and now with the introduction of a WCF capability in Commerce Server 2009/2009 R2 the opportunities for extensibility of the both the user experience, and integration into third parties, are drastically increased, all with no effect to the underlying channel logic. So if you are looking at deployment options for your e-Commerce application to help support demand in a cost effective way. I would highly recommend you consider looking at Windows Azure, and if you have any questions in-particular about this style of deployment, please feel free to get in touch!

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Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

- by Chris George

Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1: Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing. Day 2 – Coming soon…

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Searching for the last logon of users in Active Directory

- by Robert May

I needed to clean out a bunch of old accounts at Veracity Solutions, and wanted to delete those that hadn’t used their account in more than a year. I found that AD has a property on objects called the lastLogonTimestamp. However, this value isn’t exposed to you in any useful fashion. Sure, you can pull up ADSI Edit and and eventually get to it there, but it’s painful. I spent some time searching, and discovered that there’s not much out there to help, so I thought a blog post showing exactly how to get at this information would be in order. Basically, what you end up doing is using System.DirectoryServices to search for accounts and then filtering those for users, doing some conversion and such to make it happen. Basically, the end result of this is that you get a list of users with their logon information and you can then do with that what you will. I turned my list into an observable collection and bound it into a XAML form. One important note, you need to add a reference to ActiveDs Type Library in the COM section of the world in references to get to LargeInteger. Here’s the class: namespace Veracity.Utilities { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.DirectoryServices; using ActiveDs; using log4net; /// <summary> /// Finds users inside of the active directory system. /// </summary> public class UserFinder { /// <summary> /// Creates the default logger /// </summary> private static readonly ILog log = LogManager.GetLogger(typeof(UserFinder)); /// <summary> /// Finds last logon information /// </summary> /// <param name="domain">The domain to search.</param> /// <param name="userName">The username for the query.</param> /// <param name="password">The password for the query.</param> /// <returns>A list of users with their last logon information.</returns> public IList<UserLoginInformation> GetLastLogonInformation(string domain, string userName, string password) { IList<UserLoginInformation> result = new List<UserLoginInformation>(); DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry(domain, userName, password, AuthenticationTypes.Secure); DirectorySearcher directorySearcher = new DirectorySearcher(entry); directorySearcher.PropertyNamesOnly = true; directorySearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("name"); directorySearcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("lastLogonTimeStamp"); SearchResultCollection searchResults; try { searchResults = directorySearcher.FindAll(); } catch (System.Exception ex) { log.Error("Failed to do a find all.", ex); throw; } try { foreach (SearchResult searchResult in searchResults) { DirectoryEntry resultEntry = searchResult.GetDirectoryEntry(); if (resultEntry.SchemaClassName == "user") { UserLoginInformation logon = new UserLoginInformation(); logon.Name = resultEntry.Name; PropertyValueCollection timeStampObject = resultEntry.Properties["lastLogonTimeStamp"]; if (timeStampObject.Count > 0) { IADsLargeInteger logonTimeStamp = (IADsLargeInteger)timeStampObject[0]; long lastLogon = (long)((uint)logonTimeStamp.LowPart + (((long)logonTimeStamp.HighPart) << 32)); logon.LastLogonTime = DateTime.FromFileTime(lastLogon); } result.Add(logon); } } } catch (System.Exception ex) { log.Error("Failed to iterate search results.", ex); throw; } return result; } } } Some important things to note: Username and Password can be set to null and if your computer us part of the domain, this may still work. Domain should be set to something like LDAP://servername/CN=Users,CN=Domain,CN=com You’re actually getting a com object back, so that’s why the LongInteger conversions are happening. The class for UserLoginInformation looks like this: namespace Veracity.Utilities { using System; /// <summary> /// Represents user login information. /// </summary> public class UserLoginInformation { /// <summary> /// Gets or sets Name /// </summary> public string Name { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets LastLogonTime /// </summary> public DateTime LastLogonTime { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets the age of the account. /// </summary> public TimeSpan AccountAge { get { TimeSpan result = TimeSpan.Zero; if (this.LastLogonTime != DateTime.MinValue) { result = DateTime.Now.Subtract(this.LastLogonTime); } return result; } } } } I hope this is useful and instructive. Technorati Tags: Active Directory

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Off The Beaten Path—Three Things Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful For

- by Christine Randle

By: Jim Lein, Senior Director, Oracle Accelerate Last Sunday I went on a walkabout. That’s when I just step out the door of my Colorado home and hike through the mountains for hours with no predetermined destination. I favor “social trails”, the unmapped routes pioneered by both animal and human explorers. These tracks are usually more challenging than established, marked routes and you can’t be 100% sure of where you’re going to end up. But I’ve found the rewards to be much greater. For awhile, I pondered on how—depending upon your perspective—the current economic situation worldwide could be viewed as either a classic “the glass is half empty” or a “the glass is half full” scenario. Midsize companies buy Oracle to grow and so I’m continually amazed and fascinated by the success stories our customers relate to me. Oracle’s successful midsize companies are growing via innovation, agility, and opportunity. For them, the glass isn’t half full—it’s overflowing. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Innovation The sun angling through the pine trees reminded me of a conversation with a European customer a year ago May. You might not recognize the name but, chances are, your local evening weather report relies on this company’s weather observation, monitoring and measurement products. For decades, the company was recognized in its industry for product innovation, but its recent rapid growth comes from tailoring end to end product and service solutions based on the needs of distinctly different customer groups across industrial, public sector, and defense sectors. Hours after that phone call I was walking my dog in a local park and came upon a small white plastic box sprouting short antennas and dangling by a nylon cord from a tree branch. I cut it down. The name of that customer’s company was stamped on the housing. “It’s a radiosonde from a high altitude weather balloon,” he told me the next day. “Keep it as a souvenir.” It sits on my fireplace mantle and elicits many questions from guests. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Agility In July, I had another interesting discussion with the CFO of an Asia-Pacific company which owns and operates a large portfolio of leisure assets. They are best known for their epic outdoor theme parks. However, their primary growth today is coming from a chain of indoor amusement centers in the USA where billiards, bowling, and laser tag take the place of roller coasters, kiddy rides, and wave pools. With mountains and rivers right out my front door, I’m not much for theme parks, but I’ll take a spirited game of laser tag any day. This company has grown dramatically since first implementing Oracle ERP more than a decade ago. Their profitable expansion into a completely foreign market is derived from the ability to replicate proven and efficient best business practices across diverse operating environments. They recently went live on Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Taleo. Their CFO explained to me how, with thousands of employees in three countries, Fusion HCM and Taleo would enable them to remain incredibly agile by acting on trends linking individual employee performance to their management, establishing and maintaining those best practices. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Opportunity I have three GPS apps on my iPhone. I use them mainly to keep track of my stats—distance, time, and vertical gain. However, every once in awhile I need to find the most efficient route back home before dark from my current location (notice I didn’t use the word “lost”). In August I listened in on an interview with the CFO of another European company that designs and delivers telematics solutions—the integrated use of telecommunications and informatics—for managing the mobile workforce. These solutions enable customers to achieve evolutionary step-changes in their performance and service delivery. Forgive the overused metaphor, but this is route optimization on steroids. The company’s executive team saw an opportunity in this emerging market and went “all in”. Consequently, they are being rewarded with tremendous growth results and market domination by providing the ability for their clients to collect and analyze performance information related to fuel consumption, service workforce safety, and asset productivity. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for health, family, friends, and a career with an innovative company that helps companies leverage top tier software to drive and manage growth. And I’m thankful to have learned the lesson that good things happen when you get off the beaten path—both when hiking and when forging new routes through a complex world economy. Halfway through my walkabout on Sunday, after scrambling up a long stretch of scree-covered hill, I crested a ridge with an obstructed view of 14,265 ft Mt Evans just a few miles to the west. There, nowhere near a house or a trail, someone had placed a wooden lounge chair. Its wood was worn and faded but it was sturdy. I had lunch and a cold drink in my pack. Opportunity knocked and I seized it. Happy Thanksgiving.

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